Starts solid, but completely loses it

Rating: 4/10 (21 December 2015)

"Pacific Rim" was one of the summer blockbusters from two years ago. This also is shown by the cast that really lacks superstars. At least back then, Idris Elba was not where he is today and Rinko Kikuchi's Oscar-nominated turn in "Babel" was mostly forgotten. Plus Charlie Hunnam is really not a particularly gifted actor. Then again, he does not need to be to make this one work, at least for the first 45 minutes, during which it is a solid science fiction film. It is about a futuristic world (though not too much ahead of us), in which alien creatures emerge from the sea and wreak havoc. As a consequence, humankind has taken measures to oppose this great danger, namely by building gigantic robots that go against the monsters. A touch of "Transformers" is undeniable.
I quite like del Toro's "Hellboy" movies, so this was particularly disappointing for me here. The reason is that after the first 45 minutes I mentioned, it is all special effects and every bit of interesting story they worked on before that gets completely thrown under the bus. What a shame. It looked like a perfectly solid movie early on and I am saying that as somebody who isn't even big on science fiction films. Kikuchi had a couple solid moments, but in the end, it did not work either because of how underwritten her character was. She gets pushed into a love interest plot for Hunnam's character and they sacrificed everything about her this way. Elba was completely wasted as well. He has such great talent, but the character had absolutely no shades or really interesting scenes. Oh yeah, and finally Charlie Day from "Always Sunny". He was certainly included for the laughs, but his character was absolutely never funny. He was basically the only one who was unbearable already in the first half hour.
As a whole, this was quite a bummer. I really did not expect it to go south that quickly and for almost 1.5 hours basically. Totally style over substance. My comments make it obvious I guess that I thought this film was way too long. It ran for over 2 hours and 10 minutes and they easily could have kept it at 90 minutes without losing a lot of substance. The alien creatures became less and less interesting too the longer the film went on. It all turned into a stereotypical uninteresting mess and I don't recommend the watch. Thumbs down.